Workbench

02/03/2009

There are only 11 days until pitchers and catchers report, and it occurred to me you might like to know that St. Louis Cardinals slugger Stan Musial (nickname: The Denora Greyhound) got 3,630 hits during his 22-year career. Fascinatingly, he got 1,815 hits at home, and 1,815 hits on the road.

01/23/2009

You ever see a P.R. flack backtrack? Watch whoever it is who has to step up to the mic for the NFL to address this issue sometime later today:

My youngest Marine called me this morning. In the course of the
conversation he made mention of being part of the Color Guard for the
ceremonies at the Super Bowl. He has been part of other Color Guards at
other games and has been able to enjoy the entire game after presenting
the Colors. HOWEVER, this will not be the case this time. The 12
man/women color guard will be presenting the Colors and then will be
escorted out of the stadium and therefore not allowed to see the game.

Prediction: on game day, expect to see the color guard escorted to the commissioner's box for a photo op.

01/21/2009

Players in the Lingerie Football League -- who play football in their underpants for the entertainment of men too impatient to wait to see semi-naked women during commercial breaks -- are outraged. The league, it seems, has scheduled the championship game -- the "Lingerie Bowl" -- to be played at a nudist camp. In an article penned by the aptly named Emily Nipps, Quarterback Reby Sky, shown here in a mugshot after her arrest for "opposing an officer", says that playing in front of naked people is more than she can swallow.

"I don't have anything against the lifestyle," Sky said, referring to
the nudist resort Caliente. "But we as players were having a hard
enough time dealing with and defending against the negative stigmas and
stereotypes associated with the sport and playing attire before it was
announced that we would be playing at a nudist resort."

The Lingerie Bowl is -- you saw this coming, right? -- a pay-per-view event scheduled to be played during the Superbowl halftime. This year's version was originally booked to take place in a vacant lot in Tempe, Arizona, until neighbors complained about...well, about everything, really: noise, traffic, women running around in frilly boyshorts. The league then moved the bowl to the nudist resort in Land o' Lakes, Florida. (Tickets are $35 and the "Ultimate VIP Super Party" the night before is hosted by former person Dennis Rodman.) Clearly, it never occurred to organizers that the "models" they'd hired to play football in their underwear would object to the indignity of playing in front of people wearing even less.

Ricker Yankowski (seriously: they've got to be making up these names) runs an agency that represents several players, and says his clients haven't been paid for previous games. He also says that the $1,000 fee each player is going to get for appearing in the Lingerie Bowl is lower than the league promised.

"I never thought it would come down to this," Yankowski said. "Taking
these girls away from home and family and work, then paying them a lot
less, then making them play at a nudist resort, is below moral."

Ah, yes: the lines we draw. Mr. Yankowski's modeling agency, Models Without Attitude, has a web page that features not just a photo of Mr. Yankowski himself, but also a statement of faith:

Models Without Attitude is successful for one reason only. MWA gives thanks to GOD. Only with his blessings is this company able to achieve greatness.

Greatness being one of those subjectively defined things, I suppose.

There's no word on whether Mr. Yankowski's clients -- and thus Mr. Yankowski -- receive a cut of the profits from the sale of the players' game worn uniforms.

The league insists, no matter how outraged the players may be, that the game will go on. There are, league spokesman Stephon McMillen says, "thousands of models" in and around Tampa who would love to don the kneepads and push-up bras of the Lingerie Football League.

"The game will go on," he said, "only with more talented and team-oriented players."

01/06/2009

The biggest Beer Pong tournament in the world has concluded in Las Vegas. With $50,000 in prize money at stake, it's no surprise the winner of the World Series of Beer Pong finished the tourney a bit in his cups.

Ron Hamilton, 25, of Brentwood, N.Y., preferred
liquor to beer, and said he got ready for Sunday's play by drinking a
bottle of Jack Daniels.

"The key today was me getting real drunk
and my partner not missing, and us coming out and proving we're the
best," Hamilton said shortly after winning the top prize with Michael
Popielarski, 25, of Massapequa, N.Y.

Invented by college kids with time to kill and a seemingly unquenchable thirst for beer, Beer Pong is becoming big -- well, relatively big -- business. The WSOBP is modeled after the World Series of Poker. Contestants pay to enter the tournament, creating a pool of prize money big enough to attract the attention of other players. This year, more than 400 teams payed the $550 entry fee to compete. Room packages for the
four day event were available from $500, double occupancy. All-in -- as they say in the poker business -- Beer Pongers probably filled 20% of the Flamingo Hotel's 3,600 rooms in what would normally be a dead, post-New Year week.

There are any number of Beer Pong entrepreneurs. Bing Bong, a three-year old start-up, claims to have sold 10,000 "official" Beer Pong tables at between $85 and $130 -- custom-built can cost even more. Bing Bong projects $1 million in revenue this year, which says to me they could go public at a higher market capitalization than GM.

BJ's Beer Pong, a start-up capitalized with $50,000 in friends and family money, has sold 8,000 tables ranging in price up to $250,000, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. Let me repeat that: the Wall Street Journal. I just came out of an $80 million start-up and we couldn't get any press attention until we went bust.

For the moment, the reigning king of the Beer Pong world is bpong.com, which conceived and holds the high visibility WSOBP in Vegas.

This World Series of Beer Pong is the brainchild of entrepreneurs
Billy Gaines, Duncan Carroll and Ben "Skinny" Solnik. The trio met as
students and beer pong aficionados at Carnegie Mellon University.

After graduation, they set out in their spare time to turn the game they loved into a moneymaker. Their site,bpong.com, sells tables, T-shirts, balls and other gear. The company organizes
satellite tournaments and is a clearinghouse for detailed and
occasionally heated conversation about the game's rules. This one made
it into the world series official rule book: "No player may take
offense to anything said or done during a game, even if it involves
their mother."

12/16/2008

I'm thinking pretty seriously about buying a place in the country and stocking it with canned goods and ammunition. My father always said, "It's good to have a Plan B," and I'm thinking a good Plan B might be a reinforced bunker and no need to go outside until, say, the Spring of 2015.

The warning signs are all around us: stock market collapse, weird armed conflicts over nothing all over the world, and complete disarray in the National Basketball Association:

Reggie Theus got barely more than 100 games to lead the Sacramento
Kings before they headed in yet another direction with yet another new
head coach...Theus is the sixth coach fired in the NBA already this season.

I count 30 NBA teams; 20% have dumped their coach in the early weeks of the season. The Kings currently have three head coaches on their payroll: Theus,
the guy before Theus, and the new guy who's replacing Theus. Would any
sane organization do that if it really thought it was going to have to
pay-out all those contracts? Of course not. Clearly, the Sacremento
Kings and NBA believe the world is going to end soon.

12/15/2008

According to the Guardian, Tiger Wood's caddie Steve Williams doesn't like Phil Mickelson. To illustrate why, Williams says Mickelson is insecure about his "soft pectorals" and tells this story about golf's perennial #2 player:

The two players (Tiger and Phil) were walking down the 17th fairway when, according to
Williams, someone shouted "Phil" in Mickelson's direction. The world
No2 did not respond until the fan shouted "Hey, Mr Mickelson". When
Mickelson turned and waved, the fan yelled out "Nice tits". The crowd
erupted in laughter; Mickelson went double bogey, bogey and his chances
of winning the tournament disappeared.

Mikelson responded -- seriously, he paid a publicist to concoct and distribute a press release about Williams' impolite remarks. In his statement, Mickelson denied he has man boob issues and says of Williams:

"After
seeing Steve Williams' comments all I could think of was how lucky I am
to have a class act like Bones on my bag and representing me."

Leaving aside, for the moment, the unfortunate phrase "Bones on my bag," Mickelson's P.R. staff claims that the "nice tits" story originated with "a European Tour player" who was teased by the bethpage Black crowd at the U.S. Open in 2002.

By the way, I'm guessing the "European Tour player" in question is Colin Montgomerie, a fussy Scot that American galleries love to harass. Also, he's got man boobs.

12/01/2008

While killing Thanksgiving time with family, my wife and I took a bunch of nieces and nephews bowling. Bowling is not our natural sport, and the people on the lanes next to us became openly scornful not only of our technique but of our manners. The small-town bowling alley was filled with people who took bowling as seriously as I take golf, and had any of them behaved on the golf course the way we behaved in the bowling alley I'd have called for a Congressional investigation. Whatever scorn they showed, we certainly deserved.

The kids would pick up the balls and lug them forward without the requisite ritual of standing and staring at the pins. This disturbed the rhythm of everyone around us, since no one could time their approach -- is that what it's called when you run up and release the ball? -- to quiet moments when their concentration would be undisturbed. We fired away without regard for whether the person next to them was deep in concentration, the bowling equivalent of talking while someone is putting. We had no idea how to operate the automatic score-keeping machine, and every tiny technical problem became the subject of much howling and teasing. Perhaps worst of all, after rolling the ball down the lanes our apparently uncoordinated kids would fall dramatically to the side, earning big laughs from their cousins but disrupting those trying to bowl well next us.

In short, we were a disgrace.

We bowled two games. It took us, roughly, 12 hours, since most of the time whoever was due to bowl was in the bathroom or getting a snack or, in one particular egregious case, playing a video game. Even had everyone been ready when required, it would have taken us a long time because we rolled the balls so slowly.

At the end of all that, the high score for the day was 112, banked by my attorney brother who was in an actual bowling league while younger and more foolish. He tried to keep us in line, but we were unteachable. In the end, he focused on his own game and pretended he didn't know us.

It was a media scandal when Presidential candidate Barack Obama bowled a 37 on the campaign trail. I do not, for the life me, understand how anyone could bowl a 37. I am as incompetent a bowler as you are likely to encounter. Even at my best I am as graceless and out of place as a walrus at a gymnastics meet, and I was far from my best. I was still top heavy from the previous night's consumption of turkey,
stuffing, potatoes, pie, stuffing, rolls, gravy, sweet potatoes and
stuffing. I was wearing a stylish dress shirt as appropriate for physical activity as a suit of armor. I chose a ball that was too heavy, had holes I could barely get my fingers into, and was slippery with the oil they use to keep the lanes shiny -- but I was too lazy to take it back and search for another. And there's this: I have no talent.

Still, I bowled an 87 in the first game and 103 in the second -- nearly three times as much as the incoming president.

As we left, one of our older children dropped a ball on the tile floor and it rolled 40 feet before she could get it under control. The woman at the counter looked at me like I was crazy when I offered to buy the colorful shoes. When we went out the door, people applauded.

10/24/2008

In discussing Republicans' recent vogue for dividing Americans into "real" and "not real" categories, conservative blogger Stephen Bainbridge agrees with those who say Republicans need to acknowledge that even Democrats can be pro-American, with a critical caveat:

I basically agree, subject to the qualifier that real Americans don’t root for the Dallas Cowboys.

Confronted with a game pitting the Cowboys against the Washington Redskins, my own position is that it makes no difference who wins, so long as there are a lot of injuries.

10/06/2008

About a month ago, maybe a little more, I made hotel reservations in Chicago for the World Series. It was, I thought, a late August act of optimism that I seriously worried would condemn the Cubs to collapse. But on the off-chance that this was really the Cubs' year, I had to do it.

They immediately lost five games in a row and I thought I had jinxed them.

But they came back and went on a winning streak, including sweeping a series in Milwaukee, and I started to contemplate a future in which the Cubs were World Champions. I felt a little bit like contemplating a future of hovercars and interplanetary tourism. It was fun to think about, but as much as I believed it might happen, it never felt entirely natural.

I canceled my hotel reservations 20 minutes after the Cubs got swept by the Dodgers. I went online and pushed a couple of buttons and POOF! the dream of Rush Street revelry disappeared. And a funny thing happened: the world felt right again.

Sometimes, when some abnormal pressure builds up over time, you don't notice it as abnormal. I remember when I moved from Los Angeles to Louisville, coming out of a grocery store and seeing a man in dirty clothes who -- I was absolutely sure -- was going to approach me for money. Instead, he brushed past me into the store and I realized he was just a guy stopping for some groceries on the way home from work. I realized that, over the years in L.A., I had built up a protective layer of panhandler paranoia that may have been necessary there, but certainly wasn't normal.

Over the last month, as the Cubs kept winning despite my making hotel reservations, the feeling of my world changed subtly, a little bit each day. It's hard to describe, but reminds me of that panhandler paranoia. Over time, I became aware that I had something to lose. Games mattered in a way they hadn't before. Reports of shoulder pains and hamstring pinches and sudden hitches in the swings of power hitters distracted me. I worried.

Then the Cubs lost and I canceled my World Series hotel reservations and the world felt right again. Fall baseball went back to being a technical, rather than an emotional, exercise. I can watch games again now rooting for quality of play rather than one team or another. I can admire all the teams, not just one.

It occurs to me that the Cubs aren't supposed to be World Champions, that my world is a more orderly place when the Cubs are out of contention. I don't know why that is, but for some reason God has ordained that the Cubs' season will always end in disappointment. Perhaps it's some Jobic test of faith; I have no idea. But the result of that is that the playoffs and World Series are more joyful to watch than they would be if I had to worry about who won.

And then there is this: for me, Spring is a season of optimism. It stands out among the seasons because it is the time of year when I give myself unreservedly over to hope. I don't know how much of that is due to the first daffodils and how much to women in flowered dresses and how much to the fact that the Cubs have both a chance and plenty of time to blow it. With 160 games left to play, each game is of only minor importance. (Unlike the playoffs, when every pitch is nerve-wracking torture.) My optimism is without dread in the Spring, and the Cubs are right there in the mix, a big part of something that seems fundamental to my being.

I don't know if Spring would be the same if the Cubs were reigning World Champions. I don't know if I would be the same. It seems to me facing Spring as a nowhere-to-go-but-down proposition would be more than I could bear.

So, in thinking about it, I guess I'm relieved that the Cubs got swept. It guarantees that next Spring is going to be beautiful. They had a hell of a year. By my calendar, it's only 128 days until pitchers and catchers report, and I really think the Cubs could take it all. Next year.